Introducing Vanilla Enterprise Community Analytics

Recently Vanilla Forums released an updated version of the Community Analytics available with our Enterprise package.  The goal was to provide insight on the overall community health trends in your customer community.  The Enterprise Analytics suite tracks four main areas: Traffic, Users/Community, Content, and Q&A.

Traffic

Within traffic, the following statistics are tracked: Page Views, Visits, Visits per User, and Time On Site.  Page Views are broken down by Guests, Users, and Searches.  Visits, Visits per User and Time On Site are all broken down by Guests, Members and Moderators.  Traffic is in general a metric of the level of awareness or reach of the community. Time On Site you can also regard as an engagement metric.

Users / Community

Within the users / community section we track activity by: New Users, Active Users (Unique Visits), and Contributing Users.  The users / community is segmented by Guests, Members and Moderators and is generally an active membership metric.

Content

The content section of the analytics package tracks Discussions, Comments, and Users Per Discussion (Thread). Since content can only be posted by either members or moderators, this section is segmented between those two only.  Content is considered an engagement metric.

Q&A

The Q&A section applies to those customer communities that want to track the # of times customers ask questions, how many answers there are, how many accepted answers there are, and the average time it takes a question to be answered.  This is great for measuring the level of responsiveness to questions in the forum, both from internal staff and from the general community.  Q&A is considered a specialized support or responsiveness metric.

You can also relate the Q&A as a financial metric.  For instance, if you know that a direct phone or e-mail support request costs you on average x (let’s say $50) and that a re-usable community support answer costs you on average y (let’s say $5), then you can calculate the financial return (ROI) of your total community support answers for the month (z) as: ROI = z*(x-y).  So if you had 350 community answers in a month, your ROI for the month would be 350*(50-5) = $15,750.00.

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